Modern media capture devices such as scanners, digital cameras, and digital video recorders are capable of capturing very large amounts of data. Although local storage of relatively large files is typically not a problem for most users due to the wide availability of inexpensive memory, large file sizes can cause problems where the user desires to transmit the files over a network (e.g., Internet) to a destination device such as a personal computer (PC) of an email recipient or a network server that is maintained by a repository provider. In particular, large files may take a long time to reach the destination device, particularly where the sender and/or recipient connection to the network is not a high-speed connection.
Although users often opt to collect the maximum amount of data, there are limits as to the utility of capturing this much data. For instance, many scanners and/or digital cameras are available in the market that are capable of resolutions several times the maximum that can be detected by the observer. Users are often unaware, however, that they could obtain substantially the same result with less data and, therefore, smaller media files. Even where the reduction of file size would result in a noticeably lower quality result, there are situations in which high transmission speed may be more important to the user than high quality.
Unfortunately, media capture device users often do not appreciate the effect file size has on transmission. Therefore, such users often transmit unnecessarily large files without considering the negative effect the file size will have on the transmission. Even where the user does appreciate that file size affects transmission, many such users do not know how to properly modify the data so as to obtain a more reasonably-sized file. Therefore, the user may recognize the problem although may not know how to remedy it. Although most of these difficulties can be remedied by the user creating relatively small media files, this solution is unsatisfactory in that the user may not choose to transmit many of the files (e.g., captured images) and therefore could unduly limit quality (e.g., image quality) where it is not necessary to do so.